2 out of 5

Label: SFI Industries

Produced by: Geoff Garlock

I’d say ambient music has a big right-time-right-place component. Geoff Garlock wrote up a really appreciated, song by song breakdown of his 2026 release ‘Don’t Die Today’ on his substack; in wanting to ground myself for the listen, I browsed this a little first, and I think in combination with some of the tags on this album in bandcamp – ‘film soundtrack,’ ‘horror,’ ‘synth’ – and the somewhat menacing (if hopeful?) album title, I formed a picture of what the album could be.

It’s… not that. Those tags are definitely fitting for some of Garlock’s other material, but I likely should’ve focused on the names dropped in the first part of the Substack – Steve Reich; Michael Garrison – for a better guess of Don’t Die Today’s sound: longform synths, framed by found sounds of waves, or nature tinklings, or distant voices.

As to the right-time-right-place, I want to allow for that in my ratings. While I do I think I learn to take an album on its own terms (even if, and maybe especially if, I’ve misjudged it at first), there’s a kind of meditational nature to music of this type that my frantic, frazzled brain may not have been set for. However, I found it hard to get very much out of this, whether listening intently or passively; the found sounds that intro each track are so compelling – and inform quite a bit of the substack track breakdowns – that I was hoping / wanting for the accompanying music to either incorporate the sounds more, or to reflect (or juxtapose) them in some way, but I really feel I only got that in two instances: the album’s only presence of a beat on Racing Thoughts in Calm Water perfectly works with its buzzing low-end and lolling high-end synths to emulate the sensation implied by its title; and closer White Point Thrashing is perhaps a juxtaposition – the “thrashing” is of the wind, based on the ambient intro – but by dint of being the album’s ender, it gains an extra layer of contemplation when pairing that thrashing with the music’s calmness.

Elsewhere, though, my untrained ears couldn’t find much difference between the various synth tracks except at superficial levels – ‘Into the Icy Abyss,’ the opener, has a bit of a cavernous sound vs. ‘Walk Through Future Cherry Blossoms’ being a bit more forefronted – and that similarity, plus a general mismatch between song names and vibes (though that interpretation is purely subjective) had me quite uninvolved throughout the majority of the album. Meaning I look to ambient / found sound recordings for a type of storytelling, or internal world-building, and Don’t Die Today didn’t – or rarely – hit me there, a not even necessarily giving me different experiences from song to song.

Clearly, though, perhaps moreso than other genres, this is a YMMV experience, with the right-time-right-place putting you in a position where the music lands in a way it didn’t for me..